Founded in 1683, The Ashmolean is the University of Oxford’s Museum of Art and Archaeology. The closest place for prayer is the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies masjid, or the Oxford Central Mosque.

The Museum is home to a large Islamic Middle East Collection (over 4,000 objects), including fine pieces of ceramics, metalwork, glass, wood and ivory, textiles, and works on paper and parchment, made in a wide region extending from Spain to Central Asia over a period of over a thousand years. The collection also includes a handful of bound Quranic codices and Quranic pages. The museum also has a few holdings of modern and contemporary art, including paintings by Ali Omar Emres, and sculptures by Alfred Basbous. Part of the collection can be found displayed in the Islamic Middle-East Gallery: ‘The Prince Sultan bin Abdul-Aziz Al-Saud Gallery’. 

Since 1973, The Ashmolean has held over 8,000 negatives in the The Cresswell Photo Archive Collection. Professor Sir Keppel Cameron Creswell (1879-1974) documented Islamic architecture including in Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Palestine. His work, particularly the volumes on early Islamic architecture and the Islamic architecture of Egypt, remain to this day essential reference for students and conservators as well as specialists in the field. The American University in Cairo has digitised a large number of prints, which can be viewed here. Omnia Abdel Barr, Barakat Fellow at the V&A is leading the digitisation of K.A.C. Creswell’s archive to re-join the scattered collections, in collaboration with the American University in Cairo, the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford and Harvard University. 

Established in 2000, The Beattie Archive is an outstanding resource in Carpet Studies. The archive holds May Beattie’s specialist collection of 14000 books and her collection of carpets and weavings – more than 100 items dating from the 19th and 20th century, including from the Islamic world. 

The Newberry Collection of Islamic Embroideries is a major resource for the study of the history of textile design from Islamic Egypt and India, offered to the museum by the Egyptologist Percy Newberry. The entire collection consists of 2272 items which fall into the following three groups: embroideries from the Islamic period - 1010; resist- and mordant-dyed, mainly medieval Indian cloths traded to Egypt - 1226; and pre-Islamic pattern-woven textiles - 36. 

The Yousef Jameel Centre for Islamic and West Asian Art sponsored the digitisation of the Eastern Art collection. This is now a static website which is due to be decommissioned, but a useful resource to check alongside the main website that is still in the process of transferring over and updating the digitised collection. There are also a number of open access publications about the Ashmolean’s collections that are available on the Yousef Jameel website.

The Museum is also home to the Centre for the Study of Eastern Art Study Room (Jameel Study Centre), where you can view objects from the reserve collections. To use the space you will need to book an appointment at least a week in advance, by emailing: eastudycentre@ashmus.ox.ac.uk or calling +44 (0)1865 288107.

Relevant Projects: 

In collaboration with the One World Committee, The Ashmolean runs The One World Festival annually, celebrating the many communities and faiths of Oxfordshire through an array of activities, performances, talks and crafts for all ages. 

The Divination and Art in the Islamic World Research Project (2015-2019), explored divinatory practices in the Medieval and Early Modern Islamic World. There were a number of outputs, including an exhibition, Power and Protection: Islamic Art and the Supernatural. 

A recent previous exhibition, Dia al-Azzawi: Painting Poetry exhibition explored the development of dafatir over 40 years of artistic production and considers the evolution of Azzawi’s distinctive pictorial language – a fusion of words and images – which would come to dominate much of his work. The installation also included drawings, prints and a monumental ten-metre tapestry immortalising the impact of war on the city of Mosul and displayed in public for the first time.

Another previous exhibition of relevance is the 2012 Al-Qur’an al-Karim: Sacred Verses, Beautiful Pagesexhibition. The exhibition has been digitised and the resources can be accessed here.

The Our Museum: Our Voices Initiative invites a group of collaborators to contribute to Museum exhibit labels. In 2023, Muslim students from Queen Mary University of London brought their faith and their personal backgrounds to their responses to the collection.

Outreach 

As part of the Public Schools programme, the Learning Department at the Ashmolean Museum offers themed talks run by curators. This is tailored for KS2 students and includes an in person session on Islamic Art and Design which explores materials, techniques and elements of design used by Islamic artists and designers, and an interactive online session on Islamic Art and Design.